TOS Kirk & Spock Deepfake

Didn't know where else to post this, but struck me as interesting.



Deepfakes, for those not aware is a software that uses large numbers of pictures/frames of people and with considerable processing can super impose those faces over those of other people on video, in this case using Star Trek Continues as a base with TOS era Shatner & Nimoy imposed over the actors. The latter is wonky as the head shapes simply don't match, but the former is quite impressive despite the dips into the uncanny valley.

Makes me curious about what could be possible with future developments of the software and other ST series.

 

Call me old fashioned, but I'm of the school of thought that actors should act and computers should do explosions.

 

I'm not overly enamoured of the process other than as a fun thing to do at home. The one exception is that I would happily replace some of the random redshirts on the bridge with Grace Lee Whitney's face (assuming the hair is a step too far) in seasons two and three .

It's easy to see why professional movie makers try to find actors with similar shaped heads.

 

Give more time and tech it (probably) will be possible to create completely artificial Shatners and Nimoys that would nearly impossible to tell from the real thing, and have them in new adventures.

But not just yet.

 

If Peter Cushing in Rogue One is any indication, they still haven't figured out how to do this well. Every time I think about how he looked in that movie, in my mind's eye, he always looks cartoony. As for Leia at the end, she looks more like someone wearing a well-made Carrie Fisher mask but not like Carrie Fisher.

 

It can be done well though. Chris Evans in Captain America, Michael Douglas in Ant Man both looked pretty good even if de-ageing Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in X3 and even Orlando Bloom in the Hobbit looked weird.

I think less is more. Tarkin should probably have only been involved in exchanges on the view screen. It was totally unnecessary to run Rogue One directly into a New Hope and if they had to feature Leia at all, they should have just replanted existing footage from a New Hope instead of a CGI full frontal.

I'd love the tech to tell my own stories using the original actors but I agree, as it is at the moment, it would look quite hokey.

 

At least with Chris Evans' face, my understanding is that they were using his real face and superimposing it on a double's body rather than trying to essentially recreate it.

 

Well, at least it beats CBS's efforts on the new Hawaii Five-0.

 

Yes and they picked an actor who looked quite like him too. I believe they did the same for Sean Young. Her hair was real and the body double resembled her before the CGI was added. Obviously, with Douglas, they also had footage from when he was younger to help make it look real.

 

I thought the same thing.

 

Soon movies will no longer need actors. Computers will do everything. Another job lost to them.

 

Hopefully they'll watch the resulting movies too, because I won't.

 

The impact of deep fake technology will be sad and creepy, turning dead actors into sock puppets. It's an affront to their dignity, in my view. Greedy heirs will license their images. You'll see a favorite old actor pop up on TV and think it's found footage, and for a moment you'll be delighted. Then the actor will suddenly be hawking some new product or crap like that, and you'll realize you're looking at a zombie bot.

But much worse impacts will be lurking if the software becomes both good and accessible. World leaders and other prominent persons will be the subjects of fake videos intended to destroy their reputations.

At the same time, real video of war crimes or other criminal behavior will be laughed off as fake by the perpetrators.

This shiny new toy is going to do a lot more harm than good.

 

It's just moving photoshop hacks. I mean, why is this the end of days and the creeptastic photoshops of an inappropriately smiling Ethan Peck with a Vulcan bowl cut are not?

People will screw around with tech for fun, whether the end product has any merit or not.

 

And Big Studios will rejoice. They won't have to worry about inflated egos and the on-set conflicts that arise from that. They won't have to worry about their star getting too big and demanding more money, creative control, etc. In a way, they've been working towards since the beginning. When the movies started, just over a century ago, the "studios" (such as there were at that time) did not put the actors name in either the movies or promotional material....Pretty much for the reasons above. Back then, the studios billed themselves as the draw. Unfortunately audiences began recognizing certain faces popping up time and again, most notably Mary Pickford, and started asking for more movies with those performers.

In Mary Pickford's case, audiences were constantly asking her studio for more of "the girl with the curls". She was amongst the first to parlay this into leverage for more money, and more control, much to her bosses chagrin. The rest is, as they say, history. The studios have understood that stars are the draw, but they've always resented them gaining that power.

As for this tech, I've wondered about this for decades and thought about the day when we'd get new movies with Bogart, Stewart, or new Trek episodes with Shatner and Nimoy.

It's not going to happen. Mainly because the further we get away from the 60's, the less audiences give a shit about those actors. The older audience is aging out, and the younger audience doesn't know who the Trek actors are, much less Bogart, and don't care that they don't know. So by the time this tech is in use, it'll be for the actors more known to today's kids, who will be dead then. Like Chris Pine, Pratt, RDJ, etc, etc.

 

Ever see Looker?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looker

Susan Dey

 

I imagine actors will start putting clauses into their wills preventing licensing of their images. So I wouldn't worry about that too much.

 

Well, there's a principle in law that says you can't rule from the grave. (A lot of movies and TV episodes about "the reading of the will" and how it controls the heirs' lives are exaggerated in this regard.) Once an estate is adjudicated and the heir has ownership of the assets, he can probably do whatever he wants with the actor's image, because no one has "standing" to sue over it. This is even more likely if the heir is also the executor of the estate.